On Sunday March 27th, while a
group of the Pakistani Christian minority was celebrating Easter, one of
the most important events in Christianity, terrorists attacked with
impunity killing 72 people and injuring more than 300. Among the
dead were many children and women. The main targets were Christians, but
the blast did not discriminate on the basis of religious identity and
also took Muslim lives.
This horrendous attack is not an exception in Pakistan, but rather a rule going on unabated for over a decade. The
atrocities are carried out by Islamic religious fanatics against other
minority groups, mainly Christians, Shia and Ahmadi Muslims.
These radicalized killers believe that anyone of a different
religious persuasion is inferior and therefore a fair target. For this
latest attack a Taliban splinter group, Jamaat-ul- Ahrar, took responsibility, but others such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Pakistani Taliban, and Jaish-e-Mohammad have committed similar assaults.
Jamaat ul Ahrar Killer (Photo: Dunya News)
Since its inception in 1947,
Pakistan has made a deliberate and conscious decision to use religious
identity as a tool to further its national security interests. Although
a religious identity, if not exclusionary and fanatic, may not be a
problem, the Pakistani version is intolerant, extreme and murderous. Not
only could this situation become an existential threat to Pakistan
itself, it is a world menace. Pakistan
is a nuclear power outside of the Non Proliferation Treaty. Any kind of
nuclear device in the hands of fanatics is a serious danger to the
world as a whole.
How did Islamic radicalization begin in Pakistan? For most of its
history since partition from India in 1947, the country has never had a
democratic secular system. The most powerful institutions of Pakistan
have always been the military and its affiliate security organization,
the Inter Service Intelligence. These institutions have pushed a
Pakistani identity rooted in Islam. This identity began to take an ugly
turn starting with General Zia-ul-Haq. Zia, the head of the Pakistani
Army in 1977, overthrew the
elected government of Zufiqar Ali Bhutto. With the monetary help of
Saudi Arabia, Zia began a major, but quiet campaign of Islamization. The
number of religious schools proliferated. These schools were staffed by
ignorant and fanatical Wahabi type teachers.
The result was that a large number of children were brought up who
did not learn much about Islam, but learned how to be intolerant and
violent. Zia also imposed rules that women should cover their heads on
television, and he established an outdated and out of context Islamic
system of punishment for criminals, among other edicts.
Former Pakistani Dictator, Zia Ul Haq (Photo: Biography.com)
The events in Afghanistan,
which shares a 1200-mile border on the west, also helped accelerate
Zia’s plan which would eventually lead to the creation of the Taliban.
The subsequent invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979
created a flood of refugees crossing the border for safe havens in
Pakistan. Once settled in refugee camps, they had no choice but to send
their children to these religious schools. All they learned was a
perverted version of Islam with no room for tolerance. Zia, with the
encouragement of the US, welcomed a large number of fighters from across
the Islamic world. The majority of the so called jihadis were Arabs
from the Middle East, but also from as far north as Algeria, Libya and
Tunisia. Zia died in a mysterious plane crash in August of 1988, but the
policies he had put in place continued.
One of the first groups to
emerge from Zia’s madrassas (religious schools) was the Taliban, who
were dispatched to Afghanistan in 1996. Their mission was to take
over the county from the warlords who had divided Afghanistan into de
facto fiefdoms after the Soviet withdrawal. Once in power, the Taliban
took religious extremism to another level. They carried out public
executions, forced women to hide in burqas and other inhumane and
barbaric practices in the name of their perverted form of Islam. Then
came the Pakistani Taliban and others.
Pakistani officials announced that they have arrested more than 200
people in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday massacre. Arresting and
killing these terrorists will not solve the problem. What Pakistan needs
to do is carry out a program to de-radicalize and reeducate large
segments of society. But more importantly it needs to ban institutional
discrimination against minorities, especially the Pakistani Christians.
The concern is that it has taken a systematic effort over a long time
to create this fanaticism, it therefore will not be eliminated in the
short term. This type of perverted religious creed has now been
ingrained in peoples’ mind in Pakistan and elsewhere, and changing their
behavior is not an easy task. Pakistan needs to come down hard on these
groups. It should also monitor the religious madrassas and expunge all
hate related material from their curricula. The Pakistani government
should also restore full rights of the minorities and make sure they are
enforced. It is high time for Pakistan to remove blaspheming laws on
the books which are designed to work against dissent and religious
minorities.
Short of any serious effort to reign in and de-radicalize the killers, Pakistan’s existence will be in jeopardy. The
terrorism and instability which has already engulfed the region will
spread further. The menace will become global if any of these radical
groups get its hands on Pakistani nuclear weapons or fissionable
material.
